The Average Joe - Barely Barista

The Cacophony of Desire

gebimble — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 20:41:39 +0000

My family, it would appear, are having a heated argument about dogs.

It may have progressed, since my last inspection, to things which are not dogs.

I believe now it may be the case that everyone who is currently downstairs hates each other very much.

Very, very much.

Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan.

This Coffee’s Got Me Buzzin’

gebimble — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 21:15:01 +0000

You all knew that keeping this beast regimen and tame would be a task beyond me, so, as it’s hardly the case that I’m damaging anyone as a result of their misplaced impressions, I’m not going to apologise. What I am going to do is briefly think about how egotistical it is for me to think that there is anyone out there reading this and then move on to the case in hand: the happenings. There has been a short, flurried amount of these before the dust settled and I fell into a routine, and this is the bit where I recount them.

So, while I’ve been away I’ve been professionally trained and then employed as a professional barista at a local cafe, where, for the first few weeks I was held up before the demanding flames of all who vied for our custom and have come away reasonably unscathed. Now I work their for at least one full day a week and take some of the strain every lunchtime (though Saturdays are, as yet, something maintained in confusion). The result of this is that I am no longer taking handouts from the government, I have a renewed sense of independence, and I am held accountable to the mild mannered public of the town in which I live. This last, I would say, is very nearly the strangest part.

I have lived in this sleepy town for nearly 23 years now, and only in the past month have I had any genuine interaction with the people that live here. I wouldn’t exactly say that I know the folks that come through our doors now, but I recognise them, and learn a little more about them every day, and it scares me to realise that they are so much more than the expanded styrofoam packing agent of my life—that their lives are as thick and robust with the wicked, vibrating fizz of living, geriatric and shut in as some of them might be, makes my heart flutter and, for reasons to myself unknown, troubles me deeply.

Still, the strangest, the most very peculiar and aberrant facet of all of this is that I am enjoying it all so very, very much.

On Degradation

gebimble — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:30:01 +0000

I am unsure as to why it is the case that trawling through the endless lists of jobs available on the internet is quite as degrading as it is, but I can’t help but feel as though a tiny part of my self-esteem is chipped away with every poorly written job description that I read. Every ‘must be competent at‘ or ‘requires proficiency in‘ is like the drip, drip, drip of vinegar onto the limestone of my estimations of what life would be like post-degree. As to why I thought life would be a rainbow trimmed highway of ice cream along which I would ride atop a mythical robot steed I haven’t the foggiest.

It may be the case that what I’m looking for is too specific. I’m postponing my attempts at getting a well-paid graduate job in my area of study for the time being in a bid to have what might be considered ‘one last (enjoyable?) summer’ and am trying to get a part-time position as a ‘data inputter’ (although I’m sure the actual term is a data entry clerk) or as a receptionist somewhere within walking or cycling distance from my home. I can’t realistically hope to get find something like this. There are only so many jobs within that range, and I possess skills that are not really suited to any of them bar the two previously mentioned professions, and even then only one of those involves skills which are coincident with my degree. I mean, I don’t necessarily want something taxing, but is it too much to hope for something stimulating? After all, a dull blade is of little use to anyone.

Sneezing

gebimble — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 10:14:31 +0000

Today, I think, is a good day for stripping my shelves of all of the beautiful tomes that they have accrued in the 22 years I’ve spent in this room. Well, I don’t think it’s a good idea, but it’s necessary for the march of progress, and I’ve kept out a few choice volumes in order that they be read this summer

Peter F. Hamilton’s The Neutronium Alchemist
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, Farmer Giles of Ham, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast
Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell’s Beyond the Deepwoods, Stormchaser and Midnight Over Sanctaphrax
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials
Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief
Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and
Ben Templesmith’s Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse

Think of me what you will from that ragtag bunch, but I’d say the main thing to take away from this unordered list is a sense of ambition.

—

Since Monday there’s not been a whole heap of happenings. My return to the Job Centre was uneventful, though it taught me that the government is unwilling to financially help you any further than a job-seeker’s allowance and that, though their system has the scope to find jobs specifically aimed at people with an all-pervading background in physics, there are either no companies in need of a physicist, or there are no employers with that little self-respect as to go through the Job Centre.

Otherwise, I’ve been modifying my CV and trying to fix my laptop. I’ve been writing the CV in LaTeX (not the rubber manufacture material, the typesetting language) and using the template provided by Thomas Jansson to do so. The results, I feel, are monumentally pretty, and will hopefully do a sufficient job of making my CV stand out from the rest of the applicants that are out there.

—

Running out of coffee.

Keeping Busy

gebimble — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:43:00 +0000

My degree came to a close last Friday¹ and now I am what I would like to consider a ‘PseudoAdult‘ or ‘ProtoPerson‘. They are Strange creatures, these, and, by extension, I too, if not before, am now becoming also quite Strange. Not strange, no; you’d be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t thought me strange over the years, no; rather Strange is that creature so alien as to be unrecognisable to Your Fifteen-Year-Old Self, so foreign as to look at your reflection sometimes quizzically.

No longer quite the fertile ground of Youth and not quite yet the well-nested forest of Adulthood, the time of the ProtoPerson is the mad scrabble of every seed and bulb of possibility in their frenzied struggle for supremacy over the rich earth in which they dwell. Deterministically speaking if you were to inspect the soil it’s hardly difficult to tell which seedlings would take root and which would wither, but the weather that scuttles across the sky is, as we well know, unpredictable, almost to the point that we would have to call it an unknown factor.

In short [sic.: tl;dr²], what happens next is anybody’s guess.

—

Today I went to the Job Centre, wherein I was talked to by a woman who clearly has had to deal with idiots for so long that she provides the slow, gentle speech of a well trained negotiator in all of her dealings. All the while she fixed upon me a look that betrayed a feeling that she would do well to get away from the office for a while, or to perhaps enjoy a nice sit down in a quiet room devoid of simpletons while in the mean time her mouth instructed me ‘by appointment only‘ could I speak to Those Sat Behind A Desk. I went away and bought a pair of jeans with my dad, in order that they supplement the horde of hosiery that have recently developed unsightly holes.

After having returned home I was bombarded with a rendition of Spring of the Four Seasons played on toy trumpets for half an hour while I waited to have my details taken and an appointment made. Far from marring my enjoyment of Vivaldi’s classic I was given a better insight into the great work, namely: that it should never be played on toy trumpets, that it should rarely be listened to on a continual loop for the better part of 30 minutes, and that it should never be conveyed through the medium of the telephone handset. Ultimately: I return to the Job Centre tomorrow before the sun reaches its zenith, whereupon I shall be talked down to for near enough an hour and made to feel very small, I imagine.

The rest of today? Unpacking, gentle household modifications with my dad, cups of tea, and cycling in the sunshine along the highways and byways of rural Derbyshire. Blissful.

—

¹ July 2^nd, 2010.
²Lit. ‘too long; don’t read‘.

Hello world!

gebimble — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 08:09:49 +0000

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from Tolkien it’s that every journey starts with a single step. In the great wide world of the web, consider this to be mine. Obviously it’s not like this is my first foray into the happenings of the internet, but all of my other wanderings across its great and varied pathways were more akin to heading to the corner shop because I only had enough milk to either make a cup of tea or slightly moisten my cereal, and heaven forbid I went without my morning muesli or cup of char. Surely nothing short of global domination could follow this particular expedition. Expect great [sic: mediocre] things.